This is a a contribution from Paul LeBlanc who was in the Socialist Workers Party (US) and author of Lenin and The Revolutionary Party. It deals with how Marxists in the USA dealt with the Democrats and Republicans during the movement against the Vietnam War. It was the kerfuffle caused by the invitation to Michael Ancram to speak at last week’s People’s Assembly listenathon that prompted me to request it.

I’ve been invited to add a comment about the experience in building the U.S. movement against the Vietnam war, with special reference to our relation with the Democratic Party. This is a party that supported imperialism (still does!) and helped to initiate and escalate the war, although a growing number of grassroots Democrats were sincerely anti-war, and some of them sought to pull our movement in behind one or another politician in their party who had become anti-war.

Those of us who were revolutionary socialists (in my case, in the U.S. Socialist Workers Party) naturally refused to do this, and we more or less effectively helped to block the movement from being suckered in that direction. Instead we built a very broad united-front movement mobilizing anti-war forces in favor of an immediate, unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Within that context, all could have their say – but the movement existed to place growing and uncompromising popular anti-war pressure on all of the politicians of both parties.

Within this context, we offered revolutionary analyses and education (which made sense to increasing numbers of activists, some of whom joined our socialist organization). We allowed anti-war Democrats (and even the occasional anti-war Republican) to have their say as well – and defended their right to speak. They reflected important fissures in the pro-capitalist parties, as well as indicating how broad the anti-war sentiment was becoming, and that was a good thing for the anti-war struggle. But in addition to anti-war Democrats speaking at the mass rallies, there would be anti-war Socialists offering a much sharper way of understanding the world. And we never allowed any of their slogans of compromise (for example, “negotiations now” instead of “bring the troops home now”) to go unchallenged.

Through this strategy, we built an effective anti-war movement that greatly limited the options of the imperialist policy-makers and finally helped bring the Vietnam war to an end. Useful details can be found in a book by the late Fred Halstead, and SWPer who was a central leader of the anti-war movement – “Out Now!”